You sir have so far proven to be the MOST reasonable person commenting on this article.
Thank You!
I'm a geek, I also wanted to sit at home and code or whatever growing up. Social networking on the internet is a dream come true for me, and most likely for my offspring. There's absolutely nothing wrong with letting your kids use the internet, as long as (like you say) you arm them with a bit of knowledge first. Most of the people here who are posting against Social Networking probably have absolutely no idea what their kids are doing, or have caught their kids doing something naughty, or their kids have been victimized but some sort of incident. If you just trust your kids, and give them a bit of smarts (and respect), they'll trust you back and respect you back.
Once again, thank you for being the voice of reason.:)
As much as stupid people are having kids, I don't see it as a smart idea giving the responsibility to the government to babysit these kids. If you aren't monitoring your child's activities yourself, if you aren't telling your child what's right and what's wrong, if you aren't there to raise your own child, then you don't deserve to have said child raised by some templated government system. Think about all the kids who when growing up will all be restricted in the exact same ways by the government because their parents are off working full-time. Think of all those same kids who TALK to each other... and learn how to circumvent said restrictions. If you can't take the time to raise your own child, then there is NO guarantee your child will turn out the way you want, no matter how much the government can regulate what your child can and cannot do. It takes love, it takes effort, and it takes time to raise a child.
Don't turn more power over to the government, they don't even know what to do with it.
Yes but the "War on Copyright Infringement" just doesn't sound as cool as the "War on Drugs" and the more recent "War on Terror".
If the U.S. actually releases anything to the public about the "War on Copyright Infringement", the world's going to think Bush has gone soft... and the repercussions that come with that will be humorous at best, painful at worst.
Am I the only one who thinks that the UN should regulate how many "wars" a country can have going at any one time? Perhaps say... 3. That'll smarten the U.S. up and force 'em to finish wars before starting new ones. All these wars are clogging up the pipes.
It doesn't surprise me that someone with this point of view does NOT sign their comment. Extreme right-wing satire, perhaps?
Either way, losing your internet service because someone exploited a zero-day on your box is NOT what I want to see happen. Exploits are constantly being researched by whit e and blackhats alike, but to be cut off without ANY way to defend yourself (seeing as most people don't patch for a few days... or weeks) is just unfair.
I agree fully, actually. I was just under the impression that execution was cheaper. It doesn't change my position on the topic seeing as I was already on your side.
It's the same for videos. Taking a 2 minute clip and copying it verbatim is pretty much copyright infringement.
I think what the WSJ article-writer was trying to say is exactly what you've stated here... "pretty much copyright infringement". But is it? That's the question, and he's saying congress needs to make it black/white. The problem with the case-by-case basis is that some people are going to get screwed by an over-zealous copyright holder who's playing to an over-zealous judge.
Comments?
I feel the need to thank you for this information. I was sorta against the death penalty for moral reasons (I'm one of those folks who don't believe killing a murderer fixes the problem. After all the dust has cleared... the victim is still dead.) so now I have some financial arguments too. Thanks a lot.:)
Does it really cost more to execute someone than to keep then incarcerated for life?
I (and I'm sure others too) have always been under the impression that lifetime incarceration is bloody expensive seeing as the prisoner gets 3 meals, a warm (haha) cell, activities, entertainment, etc. I guess I'd just assume that if the person is executed then it no longer takes any money out of the system seeing as they're not around to eat the 3 meals, use the warm (haha) cell, or participate in the activities.
By the way, I'm not sarcastic, I'm serious. I honestly wasn't aware it was more expensive to execute a prisoner than incarcerate them.
I completely agree. I work at a publisher and we backup incrementally on a daily basis, and full backups every weekend. I take the full backups home on a 3 week rotation (unless it's at the end/start of a month in which case I keep 'em forever) and the incremental backups are rotated weekly. I may have a lot of tapes at home, but at least I know our data is mostly safe.
I wanted to thank you, parent poster, for your handy link to that petition site. I've read up on the material, and printed off a form for my coworkers around the office to sign. So far I have 9 signatures (we're a small business) and I hope to get more. So thank you for the handy links, without you I would not have had the motivation to rally some troops.:)
Well then, it's a good thing there's no Vancouver, B.C. in the US, or Toronto for that matter. If Canada stopped letting Americans film their movies in our gorgeous locations, where else would they go? Seattle? HAH! You guys already have Seattle and look how often it's used compared to Vancouver.:P
(Sorry, had to retaliate just a smidgen, I'm Canadian after all.)
If whoever copied the data actually worked at one of these production facilities, or was a reviewer, or some sort of media-related employee.... most of the companies that do that sort of thing have their employees sign very harsh NDA's about things because of the fact that they very often come into contact with media before its release date. Even if Fox only has one leg to stand on when attempting to nail this guy, if it goes public... well, he's fucked. Period. Can we all agree on that, at least?
Not sure if you're being sarcastic or not, but there's already videos on GooTube (haha) of someone running Linux on their PS3. The PS3 "dashboard" already gives you access to boot into a different operating system, or at least it did in the video (it didn't look hacked at all).
I'm for once interested in a joint project between search engines. If Google and Yahoo! can play nice, and Microsoft is mentioned as being part of this Web 2.0 menage-a-trois, perhaps something interesting will come of this. But right now it does just look like they want to make it easier to index pages. I've been attempting to submit my sitemaps to google for ages and have yet to see my sites listed when searching for my keywords, but perhaps that'll change in the future if this works out. Guess I'll keep my eyes and ears open.
Then obviously AGAIN these companies are working on the wrong business model. If you depend on your digital product not being copied in order to make a buck, perhaps you should change your tactics to make new things rather than selling proprietary copies of the same old thing. It's a digital world, folks, and if you don't know how to survive you're going to get eaten alive by people who DO know how to survive. I expect to see artists on Second Life not taking a hit from this at all seeing as their content is constantly new and original. Even if someone copied an artists work, the original was already sold (or perhaps wasn't) but either way... the artist just paints a new picture and voila... new content to sell. This should kick some Second Life businesses in the butt and give them some incentive to create new, better products.
You can't expect IP to stay yours in a digital game (and in this case I mean a digital game that allows you to create IP, not the IP that the game creator owns), no matter how many licenses and laws they allow in the game... all it takes is someone from the real world who just doesn't give a damn about the game and now your IP is all over the web.
Technically an RIAA analogy will work with this... An artist records a song, gets a CD out there, and then somebody buys it. They rip the music in FLAC or something lossless, copy the cover art of the jewel case, and send it to all their friends. So what does the RIAA do? They sue. What does the artist do? Record new music. Somebody has to buy that new music in order for it to be copied again. I know that when you have people on the inside, it skews the statistics, but for the most part people will always buy the new content even if they copy it and give it away later.
I'm going to agree with the post below this one stating that you need willpower at the start in order not to develop the chemical dependency. If you've let your drug addiction go far enough that now you're chemically dependent on say... heroin.. you've not used enough willpower to stay AWAY from the heroin. I know in heroin's case it doesn't take many uses to addict the user, but the point is that if you don't want to be addicted, use your willpower and back the hell away. Unfortunately I've known a few heroin addicts quite closely, and it took a LOT of effort to get them on methodone. Unfortunately, one girl relapsed and is back on the street. Such is life.
And on a side note, marijuana isn't addictive. If someone is prone to mental addiction anyway, sure, they may be addicted because they feel it provides them comfort and they may feel dependent on that. But marijuana in itself isn't addictive. Just wanted to clear the air.
I'm waiting for the "Shoot the Flash Ad and we'll bankrupt another company that makes these annoying flash ads." to show up on websites. I know I'd put one on my site.
I think toad (the full-time coder involved in this project) said it best when he replied to a message posted on Frost...
The message, was asking where all the child porn was at.
toad's response was.. "We don't NEED to have childporn on freenet."
I think that's the best you can do with a (mostly) completely anonymous network like this. There is no NEED to have vile things such as child pornography, but inevitably somebody will cross that line and do it because they can. But don't shoot the messenger just because this particular messenger dresses in all black and only makes deliveries at night, at a new location every time, from a new source each time. (Okay, so my stealthy encryption analogy didn't work out as well as I'd hoped.)
If you decide to say "No Childporn" for this "freenet", then it's no longer a freenet. It's a mostly-freenet. That ruins the entire concept right at the start. Freenet means free-as-in-beer, including freedom of speech, no strings attached. Yeah, some people are gonna get hurt. Some people are gonna claim that this anonymous service is evil and allows propagation of horribly nasty things. But a lot MORE people are going to feel safer posting their blogs, their criticisms of the government, criticisms of the companies they work for, and even plain old person-to-person messages.
Personally I'm not big on paranoia. I'm not paranoid that they're out to get me, I don't encrypt everything I send, and the freenet is just a neat hobby I'm interested in... but it's still a USEFUL service to many people who ARE afraid. And when it becomes a true darknet, those people will feel safe. That's the goal I intend to work towards.
It's true. After reading about many people receiving permanent account bans without warning, even though their ToS states you get a warning first... it's sorta made me regret getting addicted to the damn game. I play WoW a lot right now, and even though I hate Blizzard for their "My way or the highway" ToS/EULA, I can't get away from it if I want to enjoy the game.
I'm still hoping that one day... a law is passed that makes it difficult for businesses to create EULA's that give all the power to the business and NO PROTECTION to the consumer. For instance, "supposedly" if I get in trouble with Blizzard, I can email them and state my issues, etc etc... but as far as I've seen (my own attempts, plus reading about other experiences), Blizzard doesn't give a rat's ass about me and won't reply. I guess once they hit that $80M/mo mark, they stopped caring if they lose a few customers here and there.
They are officially on my "Faceless Corporation" list. They're #2, right below the Fox Network.;)
(MS has a face, so that gives me something to vent my anger at... Mr. Gates)
Forgive me for saying so, but the idea of "collecting a bunch of free information off the web and then selling it for a ridiculous fee" is a well known and PROFITABLE one. All those "Prima" brand strategy guides collect information you could find for yourself after some exploration on the web, but they sell for like $29.95 at EB/FutureShop/etc.
I've personally used this technique for a paintball e-book. We spent many weeks collecting information from everywhere... Players, forums, google, etc, and put it all into an ebook with proper chapters, in an easy-to-read format.
The money charged (we didn't charge an outrageous price, I think $25.97) is for the effort required to a) collect all that information for you, b) hire a ghostwriter to make it a decent read, c) promote the book (in this case via a website).
There is nothing wrong with this practice. If you don't want to buy the ebook, then feel free to go out and scour the web for the information in the book. The reason people makes "guides" like this is so the players can just get ONE guide and find all the stuff they'd want to know.
I doubt he'd sue Allakhazam, Thottbot, OGaming, or any other free game-guide sites. He'd have no case, of course. The reason he's suing Blizzard in the first place is because they're trying to force him out of the game. *ahem* He's not actively going after Blizzard, he's retaliating. Did you even RTFA? He's suing Blizzard because their trying to use the Trademark law to stop him from profiting off his guide (which is about their game). A quote from the article: "The companies went on to threaten copyright and trademark infringement action against Kopp."
Re:Paypal Mobile More than a little underwhelming
on
PayPal Goes Mobile
·
· Score: 1
I'm assuming Obopay is in closed beta right now? I tried to visit the site and was prompted immediately for a username/password combo.
Well, after seeing this article, I figured I'd try out their service. I have a business account with paypal (had a personal account for years, business account for less than 6 months) and I thought this would be easy enough to set up. I was wrong. The website portion was fine, I added a pin number for the confirmation call, the first 20 times I tried to get them to call me... nothing happened on my end. 21st time, the call came through but the quality was awful. Finally I tried again, and the calls started coming through properly. The problem now is that they won't accept my pin. I double-checked it, but no luck. So I changed the pin (wasn't too hard), and they didn't accept the new pin either! I changed it again, still didn't accept it! So I'm REALLY annoyed. It seems that PayPal really doesn't want me to use their new mobile service.
I'm in Canada, and I don't know if anyone else has tried this service yet, but I'm tempted to email paypal letting them know how dissatisfied I am with it. Is it that hard to check an up-to-date database for the pin number I added? I've changed it 3 times, each call that came through, I tried all 3 pin numbers I had changed it to, and nothing worked. Not a single success.
Hah! That's great.
(I'm hoping this is meant as humorous, because otherwise I'm going to shoot someone.)
Honestly though, I'm tired of end-users telling me that they saw a special on a linksys router at Best Buy... if they'd take a peek in our server room, they'd see the Cisco routers, the HP managed switches, etc, and they'd realize that they don't even speak the same language as the IT department. Why does it always seem like end-users are on a different plane of existence? I'm not trying to be condescending, as I have many end-user friends whom I respect. The only thing that gets me is when end-users try to play IT-doctor, without the knowledge. A lot of the time, they don't know any better, and I can forgive that. It's when they INSIST that they know what they're doing, that's when I have to whip out the MSCE, the A+, and all the other titles (including the ones I made up for myself) and just say "I'm sorry, but that wouldn't suit our needs, but feel free to submit that idea to my supervisor."
I'm a people person for the most part, I guess I'm the odd one out in an IT department, but that still doesn't mean I can deal with people constantly whining about their email, or why the internet is slow when they're downloading torrents as fast as they can.
I propose a liaison! I need someone who speaks geek AND end-user, and can translate between us.
e.g. "The internet is slow because you're using up all the bandwidth by downloading your pirated music files. We don't have a big enough backbone to support users constantly misusing the internet we've provided you."
Translated: "You've been naughty, do not pass go. Do not collect $200."
Slashdot Mirror
There's a new tribes coming.... http://www.tribesuniverse.com/
Thank You.
:)
Thank You. Thank You. Thank You.
Thank You.
You sir have so far proven to be the MOST reasonable person commenting on this article.
Thank You!
I'm a geek, I also wanted to sit at home and code or whatever growing up. Social networking on the internet is a dream come true for me, and most likely for my offspring. There's absolutely nothing wrong with letting your kids use the internet, as long as (like you say) you arm them with a bit of knowledge first. Most of the people here who are posting against Social Networking probably have absolutely no idea what their kids are doing, or have caught their kids doing something naughty, or their kids have been victimized but some sort of incident. If you just trust your kids, and give them a bit of smarts (and respect), they'll trust you back and respect you back.
Once again, thank you for being the voice of reason.
I agree very much so.
As much as stupid people are having kids, I don't see it as a smart idea giving the responsibility to the government to babysit these kids. If you aren't monitoring your child's activities yourself, if you aren't telling your child what's right and what's wrong, if you aren't there to raise your own child, then you don't deserve to have said child raised by some templated government system. Think about all the kids who when growing up will all be restricted in the exact same ways by the government because their parents are off working full-time. Think of all those same kids who TALK to each other... and learn how to circumvent said restrictions. If you can't take the time to raise your own child, then there is NO guarantee your child will turn out the way you want, no matter how much the government can regulate what your child can and cannot do. It takes love, it takes effort, and it takes time to raise a child.
Don't turn more power over to the government, they don't even know what to do with it.
Yes but the "War on Copyright Infringement" just doesn't sound as cool as the "War on Drugs" and the more recent "War on Terror".
If the U.S. actually releases anything to the public about the "War on Copyright Infringement", the world's going to think Bush has gone soft... and the repercussions that come with that will be humorous at best, painful at worst.
Am I the only one who thinks that the UN should regulate how many "wars" a country can have going at any one time? Perhaps say... 3. That'll smarten the U.S. up and force 'em to finish wars before starting new ones. All these wars are clogging up the pipes.
It doesn't surprise me that someone with this point of view does NOT sign their comment. Extreme right-wing satire, perhaps?
... or weeks) is just unfair.
Either way, losing your internet service because someone exploited a zero-day on your box is NOT what I want to see happen. Exploits are constantly being researched by whit e and blackhats alike, but to be cut off without ANY way to defend yourself (seeing as most people don't patch for a few days
No. Plain, simple, no.
There are other ways to deal with this.
I agree fully, actually. I was just under the impression that execution was cheaper. It doesn't change my position on the topic seeing as I was already on your side.
Preaching to the choir.
I feel the need to thank you for this information. I was sorta against the death penalty for moral reasons (I'm one of those folks who don't believe killing a murderer fixes the problem. After all the dust has cleared... the victim is still dead.) so now I have some financial arguments too. Thanks a lot. :)
Does it really cost more to execute someone than to keep then incarcerated for life? I (and I'm sure others too) have always been under the impression that lifetime incarceration is bloody expensive seeing as the prisoner gets 3 meals, a warm (haha) cell, activities, entertainment, etc. I guess I'd just assume that if the person is executed then it no longer takes any money out of the system seeing as they're not around to eat the 3 meals, use the warm (haha) cell, or participate in the activities. By the way, I'm not sarcastic, I'm serious. I honestly wasn't aware it was more expensive to execute a prisoner than incarcerate them.
I completely agree. I work at a publisher and we backup incrementally on a daily basis, and full backups every weekend. I take the full backups home on a 3 week rotation (unless it's at the end/start of a month in which case I keep 'em forever) and the incremental backups are rotated weekly. I may have a lot of tapes at home, but at least I know our data is mostly safe.
I wanted to thank you, parent poster, for your handy link to that petition site. I've read up on the material, and printed off a form for my coworkers around the office to sign. So far I have 9 signatures (we're a small business) and I hope to get more. So thank you for the handy links, without you I would not have had the motivation to rally some troops. :)
Well then, it's a good thing there's no Vancouver, B.C. in the US, or Toronto for that matter. If Canada stopped letting Americans film their movies in our gorgeous locations, where else would they go? Seattle? HAH! You guys already have Seattle and look how often it's used compared to Vancouver. :P
(Sorry, had to retaliate just a smidgen, I'm Canadian after all.)
If whoever copied the data actually worked at one of these production facilities, or was a reviewer, or some sort of media-related employee.... most of the companies that do that sort of thing have their employees sign very harsh NDA's about things because of the fact that they very often come into contact with media before its release date. Even if Fox only has one leg to stand on when attempting to nail this guy, if it goes public... well, he's fucked. Period. Can we all agree on that, at least?
Not sure if you're being sarcastic or not, but there's already videos on GooTube (haha) of someone running Linux on their PS3. The PS3 "dashboard" already gives you access to boot into a different operating system, or at least it did in the video (it didn't look hacked at all).
Wow, did you post this using telepathy? I've always wondered how that worked.
I'm for once interested in a joint project between search engines. If Google and Yahoo! can play nice, and Microsoft is mentioned as being part of this Web 2.0 menage-a-trois, perhaps something interesting will come of this. But right now it does just look like they want to make it easier to index pages. I've been attempting to submit my sitemaps to google for ages and have yet to see my sites listed when searching for my keywords, but perhaps that'll change in the future if this works out. Guess I'll keep my eyes and ears open.
Then obviously AGAIN these companies are working on the wrong business model. If you depend on your digital product not being copied in order to make a buck, perhaps you should change your tactics to make new things rather than selling proprietary copies of the same old thing. It's a digital world, folks, and if you don't know how to survive you're going to get eaten alive by people who DO know how to survive. I expect to see artists on Second Life not taking a hit from this at all seeing as their content is constantly new and original. Even if someone copied an artists work, the original was already sold (or perhaps wasn't) but either way... the artist just paints a new picture and voila... new content to sell. This should kick some Second Life businesses in the butt and give them some incentive to create new, better products.
You can't expect IP to stay yours in a digital game (and in this case I mean a digital game that allows you to create IP, not the IP that the game creator owns), no matter how many licenses and laws they allow in the game... all it takes is someone from the real world who just doesn't give a damn about the game and now your IP is all over the web.
Technically an RIAA analogy will work with this... An artist records a song, gets a CD out there, and then somebody buys it. They rip the music in FLAC or something lossless, copy the cover art of the jewel case, and send it to all their friends. So what does the RIAA do? They sue. What does the artist do? Record new music. Somebody has to buy that new music in order for it to be copied again. I know that when you have people on the inside, it skews the statistics, but for the most part people will always buy the new content even if they copy it and give it away later.
I'm going to agree with the post below this one stating that you need willpower at the start in order not to develop the chemical dependency. If you've let your drug addiction go far enough that now you're chemically dependent on say... heroin.. you've not used enough willpower to stay AWAY from the heroin. I know in heroin's case it doesn't take many uses to addict the user, but the point is that if you don't want to be addicted, use your willpower and back the hell away. Unfortunately I've known a few heroin addicts quite closely, and it took a LOT of effort to get them on methodone. Unfortunately, one girl relapsed and is back on the street. Such is life. And on a side note, marijuana isn't addictive. If someone is prone to mental addiction anyway, sure, they may be addicted because they feel it provides them comfort and they may feel dependent on that. But marijuana in itself isn't addictive. Just wanted to clear the air.
I'm waiting for the "Shoot the Flash Ad and we'll bankrupt another company that makes these annoying flash ads." to show up on websites. I know I'd put one on my site.
I think toad (the full-time coder involved in this project) said it best when he replied to a message posted on Frost...
The message, was asking where all the child porn was at.
toad's response was.. "We don't NEED to have childporn on freenet."
I think that's the best you can do with a (mostly) completely anonymous network like this. There is no NEED to have vile things such as child pornography, but inevitably somebody will cross that line and do it because they can. But don't shoot the messenger just because this particular messenger dresses in all black and only makes deliveries at night, at a new location every time, from a new source each time. (Okay, so my stealthy encryption analogy didn't work out as well as I'd hoped.)
If you decide to say "No Childporn" for this "freenet", then it's no longer a freenet. It's a mostly-freenet. That ruins the entire concept right at the start. Freenet means free-as-in-beer, including freedom of speech, no strings attached. Yeah, some people are gonna get hurt. Some people are gonna claim that this anonymous service is evil and allows propagation of horribly nasty things. But a lot MORE people are going to feel safer posting their blogs, their criticisms of the government, criticisms of the companies they work for, and even plain old person-to-person messages.
Personally I'm not big on paranoia. I'm not paranoid that they're out to get me, I don't encrypt everything I send, and the freenet is just a neat hobby I'm interested in... but it's still a USEFUL service to many people who ARE afraid. And when it becomes a true darknet, those people will feel safe. That's the goal I intend to work towards.
It's true. After reading about many people receiving permanent account bans without warning, even though their ToS states you get a warning first... it's sorta made me regret getting addicted to the damn game. I play WoW a lot right now, and even though I hate Blizzard for their "My way or the highway" ToS/EULA, I can't get away from it if I want to enjoy the game.
;)
I'm still hoping that one day... a law is passed that makes it difficult for businesses to create EULA's that give all the power to the business and NO PROTECTION to the consumer. For instance, "supposedly" if I get in trouble with Blizzard, I can email them and state my issues, etc etc... but as far as I've seen (my own attempts, plus reading about other experiences), Blizzard doesn't give a rat's ass about me and won't reply. I guess once they hit that $80M/mo mark, they stopped caring if they lose a few customers here and there.
They are officially on my "Faceless Corporation" list. They're #2, right below the Fox Network.
(MS has a face, so that gives me something to vent my anger at... Mr. Gates)
Forgive me for saying so, but the idea of "collecting a bunch of free information off the web and then selling it for a ridiculous fee" is a well known and PROFITABLE one. All those "Prima" brand strategy guides collect information you could find for yourself after some exploration on the web, but they sell for like $29.95 at EB/FutureShop/etc. I've personally used this technique for a paintball e-book. We spent many weeks collecting information from everywhere... Players, forums, google, etc, and put it all into an ebook with proper chapters, in an easy-to-read format. The money charged (we didn't charge an outrageous price, I think $25.97) is for the effort required to a) collect all that information for you, b) hire a ghostwriter to make it a decent read, c) promote the book (in this case via a website).
There is nothing wrong with this practice. If you don't want to buy the ebook, then feel free to go out and scour the web for the information in the book. The reason people makes "guides" like this is so the players can just get ONE guide and find all the stuff they'd want to know.
I doubt he'd sue Allakhazam, Thottbot, OGaming, or any other free game-guide sites. He'd have no case, of course. The reason he's suing Blizzard in the first place is because they're trying to force him out of the game. *ahem* He's not actively going after Blizzard, he's retaliating. Did you even RTFA? He's suing Blizzard because their trying to use the Trademark law to stop him from profiting off his guide (which is about their game). A quote from the article: "The companies went on to threaten copyright and trademark infringement action against Kopp."
I'm assuming Obopay is in closed beta right now? I tried to visit the site and was prompted immediately for a username/password combo.
Well, after seeing this article, I figured I'd try out their service. I have a business account with paypal (had a personal account for years, business account for less than 6 months) and I thought this would be easy enough to set up. I was wrong. The website portion was fine, I added a pin number for the confirmation call, the first 20 times I tried to get them to call me... nothing happened on my end. 21st time, the call came through but the quality was awful. Finally I tried again, and the calls started coming through properly. The problem now is that they won't accept my pin. I double-checked it, but no luck. So I changed the pin (wasn't too hard), and they didn't accept the new pin either! I changed it again, still didn't accept it! So I'm REALLY annoyed. It seems that PayPal really doesn't want me to use their new mobile service.
;)
I'm in Canada, and I don't know if anyone else has tried this service yet, but I'm tempted to email paypal letting them know how dissatisfied I am with it. Is it that hard to check an up-to-date database for the pin number I added? I've changed it 3 times, each call that came through, I tried all 3 pin numbers I had changed it to, and nothing worked. Not a single success.
Guess that's what I get for trusting PayPal.
Hah! That's great. (I'm hoping this is meant as humorous, because otherwise I'm going to shoot someone.) Honestly though, I'm tired of end-users telling me that they saw a special on a linksys router at Best Buy... if they'd take a peek in our server room, they'd see the Cisco routers, the HP managed switches, etc, and they'd realize that they don't even speak the same language as the IT department. Why does it always seem like end-users are on a different plane of existence? I'm not trying to be condescending, as I have many end-user friends whom I respect. The only thing that gets me is when end-users try to play IT-doctor, without the knowledge. A lot of the time, they don't know any better, and I can forgive that. It's when they INSIST that they know what they're doing, that's when I have to whip out the MSCE, the A+, and all the other titles (including the ones I made up for myself) and just say "I'm sorry, but that wouldn't suit our needs, but feel free to submit that idea to my supervisor." I'm a people person for the most part, I guess I'm the odd one out in an IT department, but that still doesn't mean I can deal with people constantly whining about their email, or why the internet is slow when they're downloading torrents as fast as they can. I propose a liaison! I need someone who speaks geek AND end-user, and can translate between us. e.g. "The internet is slow because you're using up all the bandwidth by downloading your pirated music files. We don't have a big enough backbone to support users constantly misusing the internet we've provided you." Translated: "You've been naughty, do not pass go. Do not collect $200."